Is Orange Wine Just A Hipster Trend?
Orange wine is not a trend that started in a natural wine bar. It started in Georgia, roughly eight thousand years earlier.
Someone at the bar orders a glass of "skin-contact amber" with the specific reverence usually reserved for a first edition. It arrives cloudy, faintly orange, and smells like a cider that's had an argument with a barnyard. He swirls it, nods slowly, and says "yeah, that's the brett coming through" — as if a wine smelling faintly of a wet farmyard were the entire point. To be fair, for some drinkers, it is: that barnyard note is brettanomyces, a wild yeast that can turn up during long, low-intervention fermentation, and depending who you ask it's either a flaw or a feature.
It's easy to write the whole category off as a hipster costume for wine that got left out too long. Except orange wine isn't new. It's arguably the oldest style of white wine that exists — the trend is everyone else, eight thousand years late.
What orange wine actually is
White wine is normally made by pressing white grapes and fermenting only the juice, with the skins discarded straight away — which is also why white wine isn't orange or gold, just pale. Orange wine skips that step: white grapes are fermented with their skins on, exactly like a red wine is, sometimes for weeks or months. The skins are where a grape's tannin, colour, and a good chunk of its flavour compounds live, so a white grape treated this way comes out tannic, deeper in colour, and often funkier in flavour than a normal white — hence "orange," and hence, occasionally, hence brett.
The part that predates the trend by a very long way
This "new" method is how the country of Georgia has been making wine since roughly 6000 BC, using a technique that's never really stopped: whole clusters of white grapes — most famously Rkatsiteli — fermented on their skins in qvevri, large egg-shaped clay vessels buried in the ground up to the neck. The clay keeps the temperature stable without any electricity involved, and the buried vessel has been doing this job since before most of the wine world's other famous regions existed as an idea.
The Soviet era briefly buried the tradition along with the vessels — collective wineries favoured cleaner, more Western-style whites for export — but qvevri winemaking never actually died out in Georgian villages, and UNESCO recognised the method as Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2013. When natural wine bars in Europe and the US "discovered" orange wine in the 2010s, they were mostly discovering Georgia, several thousand years late to its own party.
So is it just a trend?
The technique isn't a trend — it's one of the oldest continuously-used winemaking methods on the planet. What's trendy is a specific, extremely funky, deliberately unpolished style of it turning up on natural wine lists in Hackney and Brooklyn, often made by winemakers who are new to skin-contact whites and haven't quite got the balance right yet. A well-made orange wine is texturally somewhere between a white and a light red — tannic, savoury, sturdy enough to stand up to a strongly spiced dish instead of vanishing next to it. A badly made one just tastes like a wine that needed another look before bottling.
The style's fine. The reverent nodding over a smell that used to just mean "the winemaker's technique needs work" is the part worth raising an eyebrow at.